DETROIT  The NCAA is legally powerless to control the extravagant salaries being thrown at coaches, President Myles Brand said Thursday. But he nonetheless registered his discomfort with the eight-year, $31.65-million deal Kentucky handed John Calipari this week.

Speaking in Detroit in advance of the NCAA tournament Final Four, Brand said, "You have to ask some very hard questions, whether this is really in tune with the academic values, whether we've reached a point already that these high salaries and packages for coaches has really extended beyond what's expected within the academic community."

Hartford President Walt Harrison, a member of the NCAA's Executive Committee, was more direct, calling Calipari's contract "eye-popping, mind-boggling."

"Sort of takes your breath away in this economic environment," he said.

Kentucky made the 50-year-old Calipari the nation's highest-paid basketball coach Tuesday, when it hired him away from Memphis to succeed the fired Billy Gillispie. Calipari is guaranteed $3.7 million next season, then $3.8 million annually through the 2013-14 season and $3.25 million a year for the remainder of the agreement through 2016-17.

Incentives would pad those totals.

Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart defended the outlay, saying, "If done correctly, the investment in a coach will pay for itself and yield returns for the overall program in general."

Predictably, other coaches see little wrong with the precedent. "It's a free market," said Minnesota's Tubby Smith, who spent nine seasons at Kentucky before moving to the Gophers two years ago. "I think you see that in all facets of our society. And certainly as long as it's transparent, people know what it's about. .. I see no reason why (not).

"He's well-compensated, and we certainly wish him the best. I don't have any problems with it."

The NCAA never has tried to meddle in head coaches' salaries. It paid dearly, however, for capping the pay of approximately 1,700 low-level assistant coaches in a variety of sports in 1991. The so-called restricted-earnings coaches sued, and a federal jury ruled in their favor in 1999. The NCAA struck a $54.5 million settlement shortly afterward.

"It's antitrust if we were to try to regulate any salaries," Brand said. "But I would hope our university presidents and our conferences would ask those questions (about excess) themselves."

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